The area around Wolverine Power Cooperative’s planned coal plant in Rogers City features unique limestone geology with sinkholes and unpredictable groundwater flow. State officials and environmental professionals have warned that this leaky limestone geology makes landfills especially dangerous.

Glenn Puit of the Great Lakes Environmental News Service reports that despite warnings about the risk to drinking water and nearby Lake Huron, the Presque Isle County Board of Commissioners have approved a solid waste plan that involves dumping coal ash in a gigantic lakeside limestone quarry.

The board’s sign-off was the necessary first step in Wolverine’s quest for a state permit for a landfill for its proposed plant. It is an urgent matter to the company: Without a landfill in the quarry, Wolverine would have to annually haul at least 500 thousand tons of ash — 80 semi truckloads a day — laced with heavy metals to another, perhaps distant, location. The decision angered many opponents of the landfill, including a former member of the county’s planning commission.

“In my opinion, the commissioners aren’t looking out for their citizenry anymore,” said Bud DeLong, who was ousted from the commission last year after repeatedly raising question about the coal plant. “It’s beyond me. They’ve acted too quickly on all of this. It’s become, ‘Whatever it takes to get us that small number of jobs’ is okay, no matter what the long-term costs to the community are.”

Expected federal regulations may present additional hurdles for Wolverine.

The U.S. E.P.A., galvanized by a coal-ash landslide that ruined miles of the Clinch River near Kingston, Tenn. last December, and by the nation’s hundreds of leaky coal ash depositories, will soon announce the first federal regulations for storing ash. That could make it hard for Wolverine to place a landfill in many parts of karst-laced Presque Isle County, not just the quarry, and mean more expensive leakage protections.

Wolverine is also waiting on an air permit from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. DEQ has stated that it expects to issue a decision on the air permit application by the end of the year. In September the Michigan Public Service Commission told the DEQ that Wolverine had not demonstrated that the proposed plant is needed.